Many surface and groundwater resources are classified as sodic or saline-sodic. Sodic water and saline-sodic water both contain high concentrations of monovalent sodium ions in solution relative to lower concentrations of divalent calcium and magnesium ions. Sodic water is defined as water having a sodium adsorption ratio (SAR) value greater than 15 where the SAR value is defined by the following equation:
                    SAR        =                              [                          Na              +                        ]                                                                                [                                      CA                                          2                      +                                                        ]                                +                                  [                                      Mg                                          2                      +                                                        ]                                            2                                                          Eq        .                                  ⁢        1            
Where the concentration terms have units of milliequivalents per liter. Sodic water is found in many arid and semi-arid areas of the world and is also a high volume waste of fossil fuel production. To render sodic water suitable for beneficial use in agriculture, the concentration of the predominant monovalent cations must be reduced without substantially reducing the concentration of the divalent cations in solution.
As described in Perry's Chemical Engineers' Handbook, 7th ed., chapter 16, page 14, and in Kirk-Othmer's Encyclopedia of Separation Technology, Vol. 2, pages 1074-1076, commercially available ion exchange media are selective and will remove divalent and multivalent cations in preference to monovalent cations. When ion exchange media are employed in conventional fixed or moving bed reactors, divalent cations will be removed to a greater extent than the monovalent cations. Divalent cations, even in low concentrations, will replace monovalent cations on the ion exchange media. Consequently, commercially available produced water treatment schemes that use cation exchange media for sodium removal (e.g., treatment schemes employing Higgins Loop and fixed bed treatment technologies) also quantitatively remove calcium and magnesium. Restoring divalent cations to the solution adds to process complexity and requires conditioning of treated water by chemical addition or mineral contacting plus blending of treated and untreated water streams.
The selectivity of cation exchange media for calcium and magnesium over sodium and potassium has been the major impediment to simple, economical, single contact treatment of sodic water by ion exchange.